Susan Langlois describes how a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, changed her life during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in Spring. less

Susan Langlois describes how a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, changed her life during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in ... more

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 2 of 8

Susan Langlois shows her cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in Spring.

Susan Langlois shows her cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in Spring.

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 3 of 8

Susan Langlois documented daily life in a journal after receiving a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, that changed her life. In one entry, she writes "voices sound better - like R2D2!" less

Susan Langlois documented daily life in a journal after receiving a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, that changed her life. In one entry, she ... more

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 4 of 8

Susan Langlois, a 53-year-old former Spring Independent School District teacher, has written a memoir on her experiences overcoming deafness to inspire others.

Susan Langlois, a 53-year-old former Spring Independent School District teacher, has written a memoir on her experiences overcoming deafness to inspire others.

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 5 of 8

Image 6 of 8

Susan Langlois describes how a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, changed her life during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in Spring. less

Susan Langlois describes how a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted medical device that sends sounds signals to the brain, changed her life during an interview at her home Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in ... more

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 7 of 8

Susan Langlois, a 53-year-old former Spring Independent School District teacher, recounts how she desperatly sought out a hearing advocate after struggling to get medical help.

Susan Langlois, a 53-year-old former Spring Independent School District teacher, recounts how she desperatly sought out a hearing advocate after struggling to get medical help.

Photo: Jason Fochtman, Staff Photographer

Image 8 of 8

Teacher overcomes hearing loss to educate youths

1 / 8

Back to Gallery

The fire alarm was going off throughout the elementary school, but Susan Langlois, an English-as-a-Second-Language teacher, couldn't hear it, despite the hearing aids in her ears.

The small group of first-graders in her classroom looked at the door and back at Langlois, confused. Unable to speak English, the children did not know how to communicate to their hard-of-hearing teacher that something was amiss and were never evacuated.

When she later learned about the test fire drill, she panicked, ran to the restroom and "cried her eyes out," Langlois told The Woodlands Villager in an interview. She suffers from ski slope hearing loss, which mainly affects high pitches; she is now almost completely deaf.

"I couldn't even keep children safe," said the 53-year-old former Spring Independent School District teacher, whose education career spanned 30 years. "The children heard it but didn't have the language skills to tell me."

Langlois' struggle with coming to terms with her disability is the focus of her new memoir released in May, "Out of my World, Into Theirs," which chronicles the deterioration of her hearing and her fight to overcoming deafness.

The fire drill incident, which occurred about 15 years ago –and others like it – were the turning point in Langlois' life and the culmination of years denying that her gradual hearing loss would eventually result in total deafness. Desperate, Langlois, who lives in The Woodlands, sought out a hearing advocate who taught her about technology that could help her.

Since learning about her hearing loss in 1980 as a teenager, Langlois has been through five types of behind-the-ear, or BTE, hearing aids and one cochlear implant -- a surgically implanted medical device that sends sound signals to the brain -- in her right ear. She calls the implant her "bionic ear."

The retired schoolteacher spent most of her own school years believing there was "something off" about herself.

"People thought I was an idiot, or a space cadet," said Langlois, adding that she didn't know she couldn't hear until her diagnosis in the 10th grade. "I felt self-conscious. When you can't hear, everything is confusing."

Social interactions and school lessons were a game of "fake it 'til you make it." And when people spoke directly to her, she'd try to read lips and sometimes reply with awkward head nods, she said.

Having a child diagnosed with hearing loss several years into their K-12 education is quite common, said Julie Cordell, an audiologist at the Center for Hearing and Speech in Houston. Cordell also suffers from a form of hearing loss.

"Hearing loss is the most common disability in babies," Cordell said. "In Texas, one out of two to three babies is born with some sort of hearing loss. … Later in life, it can get brushed off as a behavioral issue, but is then diagnosed as hearing loss."

The problem is so prevalent that Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed a bill into law that mandates health insurance companies cover cochlear implants and other hearing-related expenses, Cordell said.

After receiving her first two BTE hearing aids, which, as a teenager, Langlois considered to be ugly, embarrassing, bulky, hard plastic devices that protruded from her head, the sounds "hearing people" take for granted, such as car blinkers, birds and people at a restaurant amazed her.

"What I thought was a lot of noise was the sound of people talking," she said. "Once I got used to hearing, I started thinking about my whole life."

But sometimes she struggled.

The hearing aids Langlois wore are meant to amplify sounds like a speaker. For Langlois, because she is deaf to high pitches, it amplified white noise and bass sounds, so it provided "little to no benefit," she said.

Because the technology behind hearing devices is constantly evolving, updates for hearing aids are frequent, Cordell said. Not all hearing aids are the same and some are more low-profile, she said.

Having always wanted to become a teacher, Langlois received her first classroom in 1986 when she was on her second set of hearing aids.

At times, she had to run back and forth between desks to hear students talking to her, she could not speak to parents on the phone and she could not hear the morning announcements or when a child was called to the front desk. Some of her co-workers were supportive, but "some were not and laughed at me when I made mistakes," she said.

"There is a stigma about hearing loss – people think we don't belong in a professional setting because it is reserved for the elite ones who have no physical limitations," she said.

After years of failing to hear an entire classroom due to the progression of her hearing loss, she was moved from teaching a whole class to a small group as a reading recovery teacher in 1997. By then, she had switched out her hearing aids at least three times.

Her personal life also suffered, including a strained marriage that ended in divorce in 2000 and attempts at communication with her two sons, who often grew impatient when she didn't always hear them. For the 53-year-old, adjusting to sound was like coming out of a "disconnected, isolated world" in which she had spent her whole life trying to connect to the hearing world.

"On rare occasions, it didn't work -- making it obvious that she could not hear," said her second husband, Ray Langlois, referring to Susan's ability to understand people even when she could only hear a few sounds. "This created misunderstandings and brought stress to our relationship. Overall, the demands on me, created by her hearing impairment, were minimal. … When she had a cochlear implant and it was 'turned on,' my awareness of all the sounds she had never heard before was very emotional."

When her cochlear implant was activated in 2011, Langlois' life completely changed. She could finally clearly hear her husband's voice. She took note of every new sound she heard including her dog's breathing, birds chirping and the sound of her granddaughter's voice. One especially memorable moment was when she finally heard her son, who is a violinist, play a song.

"I got goosebumps all on my arm," she said. "How does that instrument make such a beautiful sound like that? It's incredible."

For most of her life, she considered herself an outsider, looking in to a world that everyone else got to enjoy through sound except her, she said. And sometimes people were mean about it and ridiculed her.

Now Langlois is inspiring others with the disability and asking people to build a culture of kindness on her various Facebook pages. She speaks at seminars, where she discusses her experiences as an education professional and her new book. Most recently, she spoke at a seminar for the Hearing Loss Association of America in Houston.

She hopes that the memoir will reach others who have also felt like outsiders or disconnected.

She still teaches in some capacity by helping first-year teachers stay in the profession.

"Teaching is tough for anyone," she said. "The first year is the hardest."

A children's book due out later this year, meant to help kids better understand their disability, is also in the works.

"… Their life means something," she said. "If they will put one foot in front of the other, they can move forward -- and walk right into their future. But first they have to understand they are not defined by their disability."